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Well the long range siege really helps if you're doing better economically. If you can get 5-8 of them, you're going to cause a lot of trouble for Protoss players. Sieging bases seems to be a really strong point for them, not the best defensively though I think.

They are only free if the swarm host survives until the end of the game. A couple hundred minerals lost wont hurt you too bad, so bide you time until you get enough stalkers or colossus or even Phoenix or voidray to eat all the swarm hosts up. Counter to swarm hosts is basically all non gateway tech. It's a bit harder to push it back early now that mamma core lost the detection (bad decision I think).

All my experience is that you are better off without them. Honestly, their tech and their supply and gas consumption is just too big for the investment to be worth it. You are better off with infestors (they are not nerfed that much) and/or more roaches...

I've won 1 game with SH. And won every single game I've played vs SH (when I havent used them my self) - Diamond league.

Think of them as siege tanks for zone control. Use them to dictate the land where you are going to fight and help damage tier 1 ground units while you work down the stronger stuff. ie, they can help work down stalkers while your corrupters go to town on the collui or help keep marines busy while flank on the tanks or medivacs.

I'm only Diamond league, but I've been using them frequently in my games on HOTS. I use them when a Terran or Protoss is turtling on 3 bases to pressure their natural and/or third. Then I'll attack with the rest of my army somewhere else, which will force them to split their units and hopefully I can do some good damage on one of the fronts. A couple times I've even managed to take out a third base.

I just use them as a way to actually pressure my opponents before broods or ultras, without it being all-in.

Would you mind if I asked you what league you are in HOTS? So I can get a sense of when this might stop working. If they're blinking on top o your swarm hosts with stalkers it's usually not good for them assuming you have the rest of your roach/ling force near the swarm hosts to protect them. As for Tempests, I usually end up transitioning into corruptor/overseer to snipe observers. Though with the ridiculous range of the tempest they can probably pick off your corruptors from a safe distance as well. I they are going tempests, you might be able to just kill them outright, although in that situation more roaches/hydras is probably better than having swarmhosts.

They both can fight swarm hosts with an escape method (or in tempest case no threat) and if you try to make corruptors to fight the tempests, you have to also keep the stalkers occupied or they take out your corruptors as well.

In hots I just placed in Gold, I suck at HOTS, in WOL I am shitty Diamond.

I would be OK with swarm hosts if they fired up - considering they can't, there's no reason to even use them. I would rather stream lings that don't die and I can micro, rather than units that cost nothing and do nothing.

this is probably the most inventive use of SH I've heard of so far. That being said, two overseers constantly dropping changelings are the same cost, have a much greater "range" and can actually do the detection to clear the mine once it is found.

I've mentioned this build in other threads, but I had a zerg use a build on me (ZvP) where he went for swarm host, corruptor, and overseers. It was impossible for me to get at it with my ground-based army.

it seemed kind of imba to me honestly, I literally could not get any detection by those things and he just worn me down.

There have been lots of posts about swarm hosts and in their current state I along with most other people believe they are not viable at the moment. The reason is that they require a critical mass to be a positive investment and not a liability. This number tends to be around 12-15 so that's a huge amount of resources for a low mobility unit. The best way I've used them is doing zergling/queen/swarm host compositions and rushing to swarm hosts pretty quickly. Get +1 melee and ranged attack upgrades and deny the opponent's third. You need overlords for a creep highway, you need a lot of creep tumors to maintain the mobility with the queens, but if you can establish that forward position you can even reinforce with spines/spores and it's EXTREMELY difficult for the opponent to break.

I've been using Swarm Hosts lately against Terran who go mech. 8-12 Swarm Hosts with 2-5 Vipers and then roach/hydra mix does wonders against a terran mech user... especially one who's thor heavy. Swarm Hosts are nice for dictating where you want the engagement to happen so you can blinding cloud and form a nice concave. I've done this strat a few times on Daybreak now and it's been fantastic.